POLYFAULT

KERNEL READY. POLYFAULTS IN FIELD.

POLYFAULT is a top-down arena shooter behind a hostile-helpful DOS shell. You are an operator, not a pilot. Each session loads a chassis image into the field and points it at polyfaults — squares, triangles, pentagons, hexagons with mass they should not have.

Destroy them to recover cycles (CYC). Spend those cycles on eight ALLOC stats. At checkpoints the kernel offers a firmware load: a new image, or HOLD the one you have. The clock does not stop.

TEN MINUTES. THREE BOSSES.

A career run is 10:00. At 3:00, 7:00, and 10:00 the field spikes. Farm until the mark, then fight a CORE SPIKE — a polyhedral kit with armor, a tell, a strike, and an open core.

Each run rolls one early, one mid, and one final from up to 13 polyhedral kits, from the TETRA teacher to KERNEL. Clear all three and the field resolves. Die and the chassis panics. REBOOT is a warm boot. SHELL unloads to the prompt. Quitting is not a rank.

DISK0 IS DAMAGED.

The field is chewing through a drive. Its first process was a person: SUBJECT.0.

DISK0 has 40 sectors in five partitions. Every run counts: meet a sector's lines (reach a level, kill a kit, clear a run as a given image) and it repairs. It never corrupts again, even if you PANIC. Track up to three lines at a time, or MOUNT a sector to force its setup.

With each repair SUBJECT.0 comes back: first a heartbeat, then senses, then words, then memories. Its face resolves out of ASCII noise, sharper with every sector. Partition gates add new CORE SPIKE kits to your runs. Something at the root does not want the drive repaired.

54 IMAGES. 14 ABILITIES. PER-RUN CARDS.

• LOAD IMAGE at L15 / L30 / L45 — twin guns, drones, traps, slugs, body-ram, invis, writable-sector greens, and the rest of the 54-image tree. HOLD skips a tier.

• ABILITIES — two slots per run from 14 actives (JMP, FIREWALL, FORK.BOMB, OVERCLOCK, HONEYPOT, and more), unlocked through your career.

• ALLOC eight stats: HP.REGEN, HP.MAX, BODY.DMG, AMMO.SPD, AMMO.PEN, AMMO.DMG, RELOAD, MOVE.

• CARDS — a per-run pool of PATCH, MOD, and KERNEL cards. FLAGS you earn unlock more of them.

• SEV and AUTOEXEC.BAT — raise the difficulty and write your own run rules for a higher CYC multiplier.

FREE RUN

No clock. After the third spike, another one arrives every few minutes until the chassis panics. A daily FREE RUN gives everyone the same seed. Endless scores have their own board.

THE TERMINAL IS THE WORLD.

Green phosphor. Scanlines. C:FAULT> on every shell. Death is PANIC. Pause is BREAK. The wiki is a chassis tree, not a lore dump. CONFIG, STAT, RANK, and FLAGS live under SYS.

STEAM

• FLAGS — 87 achievements

• Leaderboards — CYC for 10:00 runs, plus endless and daily boards (and a local RANK.DAT of your top runs)

• Cloud — profile sync

• Steam Input — Xbox, PlayStation, Steam Controller, Steam Deck layouts

• 15 languages — interface text in English plus 14 translations